Chris Hülsbeck got his first job in games by playing tunes down a telephone. He was a teenager in Kassel who had taught himself assembly language on a Commodore 64, and he had just won a music competition in the magazine 64’er. He rang Rainbow Arts, then the biggest games company in Germany, played them some of his music and asked whether they had any work. They offered him a job in-house, and he left school to take it. Over the next few years he wrote the music for most of Rainbow Arts’ games, built his own sample player for the C64 and a sound system for the Amiga, and wrote the Turrican soundtracks that are still performed by orchestras. In English he now spells his name Huelsbeck.
The 64’er competition
Hülsbeck was born in Kassel in 1968 into a musical family: his grandmother, aunt and mother were all piano teachers. He told Retro Gamer in 2013 that classical lessons bored him, and that his “epiphany” was hearing the synthesiser hit “Popcorn”. Synthesisers were too expensive for the family, so when he saw an advert for a Commodore 64 that mentioned a sound chip with three oscillators, different waveforms and a filter, he “knew immediately that was my ticket”. His grandmother made up the last hundred Deutschmarks.
He started with games, then BASIC, then assembly language. His first commercial work was the music for Planet of War, a friend’s game sold to a British company. Then 64’er, the German Commodore magazine published by Markt & Technik, asked readers to send in music programmed for the SID chip, and he entered, hoping to reach the top ten and get onto the cover disk. He wrote his own player for the piece and typed the music into a machine-code monitor as hexadecimal numbers:
I sat there until 4 in the morning, finishing it. I had to go to school — I was only 17 at the time — and so after two hours of sleep, with red eyes, I begged my parents to put the disk in the mail for me, otherwise I’d lose my slot in the contest. Two weeks later, I found out I’d won.
The winning piece was called “Shades”. The editor then told him he wished he could write music like that but could not program, so Hülsbeck turned his player into an editor anyone could use, where typing A-3 entered an A in the third octave. He sold it to 64’er as Soundmonitor, and called it “pretty much the granddaddy of the modern tracker program”.
Rainbow Arts
At Rainbow Arts Hülsbeck wrote the music for almost all of the company’s early games. GO64! picked out his industrial-sounding score for the platform game Madness (1987). He even designed a game, To Be on Top, in which the player could build new pieces of music, and he shared a flat with the graphic artist Andreas Escher and the musician Ramiro Vaca.
In his first year he also built what he called a “digi-track” system: a way of playing sampled drums and bass notes through the SID chip, which has no sample channel. He used it in four Rainbow Arts games, but none of them was ready to ship, and Ocean’s Arkanoid reached the shops first with Martin Galway’s sampled drums. Hülsbeck was “a bit miffed”, but he said Galway’s method was different: Galway “didn’t play samples but tiny loops of memory with different values in them that sounded a bit like samples”, while his own system played real samples for as long as the memory lasted.
His best-known C64 work of the period was for The Great Giana Sisters (1987). He said its title theme was one of his first real songs, “with an intro, verses and chorus sections”, rather than a medley of sound effects. Nintendo’s objections got the game withdrawn from sale in 1988, but the music survived it. He also wrote the title music for the C64 conversion of R-Type, and the music for the Amiga R-Type and for Rainbow Arts’ X-Out.
TFMX
On the Amiga, Hülsbeck wrote his own music system, TFMX. The Games Machine reported in February 1990 that he had developed it “over years” to produce the best possible sound in as little memory and processor time as possible, and that it had given X-Out its music. It could hold 256 samples and add vibrato, portamento and echo.
In 1990 the German publisher Demonware sold TFMX to other programmers. Amiga Computing called it “a new (legal) contender for Sound Tracker’s throne”, after a manual that stressed it had been written for the company’s own games. Amiga World in the United States was less kind. It called TFMX “the first commercial offering of a programmer’s music player for the Amiga”, then added “Too bad it’s so awful”, and complained about bugs.
Hülsbeck kept developing it. For Turrican II (1991) he wanted more than the Amiga’s four sound channels. The Atari ST composer Jochen Hippel had written a system that mixed several simulated Amiga voices, and with Hippel’s help Hülsbeck ported the idea back to the Amiga. It mixed four voices into one channel and left three free, which gave him seven. He called that “the most prominent piece of my whole career”. He later used TFMX for his Super Nintendo music as well.
Turrican
The Turrican games made his name outside Germany. ZZAP! said of the Amiga Turrican in August 1990 that “the soundtrack sounds just like something Konami might write”, and its second reviewer liked the “heavy, pounding tracks”. Films were the other influence. Looking back in 2013, he named John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri and Hans Zimmer. By 1994 Edge counted his “energetic soundtracks for Factor 5’s Turrican games” among his best work.
He left the C64 behind with the music for Kaiko’s Gem’X in 1991. In December 1994 Edge found him, aged 26, working for Kaiko in Langen, the company behind the Amiga shoot-’em-up Apidya. That month Amiga Joker reported that he was going independent, to sell his music on his own account and concentrate on CDs.
Records
Releasing records had been his ambition since he was a teenager. He told Retro Gamer that “the music industry is hard, and so I built my own studio and released a CD completely myself”. That was Shades, finished in late 1991. Amiga Format reported in 1992 that the 70-minute album of remixed game themes had sold over 10,000 copies and reached the German album chart. More CDs followed: a Turrican album in 1993 and Rainbows, a set of reworked Rainbow Arts tunes, in 1994.
Factor 5 and after
By then his studio had grown into “a room full of machinery”, and his first PlayStation score, Tunnel B1, was cinematic, with “lots of orchestral elements”. In the late 1990s he moved to the United States to work for Factor 5, the studio whose members had programmed the Amiga Turrican games. The job was supposed to last a year; in 2013 he said he was in his fifteenth year there. For Factor 5’s Nintendo 64 game Star Wars: Rogue Squadron he had to fit John Williams’s themes onto a cartridge. He said he was “excited and terrified” and wanted to “treat the music with the respect it deserved, not butcher it”.
Factor 5 closed at the end of 2008, and Hülsbeck went freelance. In his words, the first year brought “barely any projects”, and he lived off his savings until he wrote the music for the iPhone game ZombieSmash.
Orchestras took up his music during the same years. On 23 August 2008 the WDR Radio Orchestra Cologne performed Symphonic Shades, a 70-minute concert of his work. In 2011 the Game Audio Network Guild gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. He joked: “I’m not 75 yet — I thought this sort of thing was for old people!”
He then turned to crowdfunding. The Turrican Soundtrack Anthology Kickstarter in 2012 asked for $75,000 and raised $175,534. He said this time he wanted to stay closer to the originals, and loaded the old pieces into an emulator “to figure out exactly how I played or programmed the tunes”. Turrican II – The Orchestral Album followed in 2016, recorded by the FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague and funded by 1,331 backers. He also went back to Giana: his music for Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams won Best Sound at the German Developer Awards in 2012.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013, pp. 90–94, “In the Chair: Chris Huelsbeck”: his family and first computer, Planet of War, the 64’er competition and “Shades”, Soundmonitor, joining Rainbow Arts, the digi-track system and Arkanoid (Galway’s “tiny loops of memory”), Giana Sisters’ title theme, Jochen Hippel and the seven-voice system for Turrican II, TFMX on the Super Nintendo, Tunnel B1, Rogue Squadron, his move to the US, Factor 5’s closure and ZombieSmash, the Shades CD, the Turrican Soundtrack Anthology Kickstarter ($75,000 target, $175,534 raised), Symphonic Shades, the 2011 Game Audio Network Guild award and the 2012 German Developer Award.
- GO64! April 2000, “Nostalgia: Portrait of Rainbow Arts” and the Andreas Escher interview: Hülsbeck’s music for most early Rainbow Arts games, Madness, To Be on Top, the shared flat, the C64 R-Type title music; May 2000, the portrait’s second part: Gem’X (1991) as his last C64 work.
- Edge issue 15, December 1994, Chris Hülsbeck profile: aged 26, at Kaiko in Langen, his first prize in a German magazine’s music competition with “Shades”, his music for Giana Sisters, X-Out, the Amiga R-Type and the Turrican games, and the Rainbows CD.
- The Games Machine issue 27, February 1990: TFMX and X-Out.
- Amiga Computing vol. 3 no. 6, November 1990: TFMX from Demonware.
- Amiga World vol. 6 no. 10, October 1990, Dean Friedman, review of TFMX Soundtool.
- ZZAP! issue 64, August 1990, pp. 72–73: Amiga Turrican review.
- Amiga Joker, November 1991: Shades, his first CD, newly finished; December 1994: news item on his going independent.
- Amiga Format Special issue 2, 1992: Shades sales and chart placing.
- Amiga Joker, December 1994, and PC Player, January 1995: the Turrican and Rainbows CDs.
- Game Concerts, “Kickstarter campaign for Turrican II – The Orchestral Album”, 10 May 2016 (web, secondary): campaign dates, $84,630 from 1,331 backers, FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague. https://www.gameconcerts.com/en/news/details/article/kickstarter-campaign-for-turrican-ii-the-orchestral-album/
- Wikipedia (German), “Chris Hülsbeck” (web, secondary): the date of Symphonic Shades and the WDR Radio Orchestra. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_H%C3%BClsbeck